What Makes Us Fascinating? Learn to Unleash Our Charm Power from the Fascination Test!
The personality test that reveals how the world sees you.
Looking back since when we were young and naive, forming our character and personality, trying to find an explanation and making sense of everything, a lot of us might have had an experience with a type of guidance we used to help us understand ourselves better, a personality test!
Let’s give ourselves a second, thinking of how many “personality tests” we have ever done so far and what they are?
For the fun and entertainment purpose, they can be something as casual as all the Buzzfeed quizzes asking us if we prefer a beach or a mountain and we are satisfied to read some sort of descriptions about who we are based on what we select.
For the more of self-understanding or discovering type, we are probably familiar with perhaps the most well-known and popular in today’s world, The Myers–Briggs 16 personalities, a thorough and well-categorized test describing 16 types of character based on the theory of Carl Jung. The DiSC assessment, which is commonly used in the business context, discusses people’s behavioral differences. These tests sometimes take 5 minutes, while some can take up to almost an hour. Going through a number of questions, we are not exhausted at all, instead, willing to reveal so much of who we are, in the return of personalized explanations that are all about “OURSELVES”
Why do we love taking personality tests?
The simplest answer is that we always love to know more about ourselves! Published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, people’s self-evaluation is driven by 3 motives
1) self-assessment (people pursue accurate self-knowledge)
2) self-enhancement (people pursue favorable self-knowledge)
3) self-verification (people pursue highly certain self-knowledge.)
“People like confirmation of their qualities, particularly strengths. In spite of the frivolity, we all have an existential craving to be validated and ‘seen.”
— Pamela Rutledge, director of the Media Psychology Research Center, and faculty at Fielding Graduate University
Our personalities also constantly evolve. According to a study tracking respondents from the age of 14 till 77, the results showed that personality stability is disrupted over time and we are completely a different person at two different ages given that huge gap of an interval. Then It is very important to reassess and have a regular check-in with ourselves.
Most personality assessments uncover who we are through how we see ourselves, is there any test that dives into how we are perceived by others?
The Fascinate Test — How The World Sees You
I was recently introduced to another personality test called “The Fascinate Test” in which the core idea is to understand how others perceive us. One question immediately raised in my mind, how could a self-assessment show how others think of us? Trying to find more information, it is explained that the test evaluates us through cues, signals and the nuances when we communicate intentionally or unintentionally. It tells how you communicate and how people tend to react to that style of communication.
Developed by Sally Hogshead, the New York Times best-selling author and branding expert, the fasciation system has 7 triggers, like seven wonders! Different people use and are captivated by different triggers. If we can activate the trigger, we immediately earn the attention, or in other words, we fascinate others!
Why is it important to learn about fascination?
“When you are fascinated, you are in the moment. You are in the flow.” This is Flow State theory by Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, which is the state when we are at our full potential and our highest performance excels. The flow occurs when the skill level and the challenge at hand are equal. Through the assessment discovering, we then learn our natural fascination talent and play to our strengths to finally unleash our fascinating magic!
The fascinate test is based on the belief to activate this flow state of our brain. The test has only 28 questions, in the 4-level of agreement with no neutral scale. Through the test we discover:
- What makes us fascinating?
- What are we good at?
- How to fascinate others?
- How we can add value based on how we are seen by others?
I gave myself a try, answering with the first gut feeling with what came to my mind first. Reading through the results report, I was definitely fascinated by it!
What does the test give you: The Archetype
— a combination of your Primary and Secondary advantages. Your most effective and efficient modes of communication
Out of all 49 personality types from the combination of 7 main triggers, I happened to have the archetype of “The Composer”, described as a combination of creative talent and a goal-focused methodical way. ‘Alert’ was my primary advantage which was considered to be the rarest type makes up only 8% of all people who took the Fascination Advantage test. And the secondary advantage was ‘Innovation.’
Find out How the World Sees Me?
- Creative and goal-focused
- When others suggest quick wins, you consider long-term consequences
- You are open to new ideas, but you don’t act on impulse. You carefully evaluate fresh ideas before implementing them in a methodical way
- Your Innovation Advantage helps you to come up with creative solutions. Your Alert Advantage pushes you to implement the best ideas on time and within budget.
- You’re always aware of what could go wrong, and you work hard to prevent problems and delays.
What does the test give you: The Dormant Advantage
Your least effective and efficient mode of communication.
- Your style of interaction tends to be more intellectual than “warm and fuzzy.” Instead of connecting with others based upon feelings, you usually connect based upon logic.
- You are generally comfortable working independently.
- You are known to rely on facts when trying to persuade others and do not believe in a product or message without first requiring proof
- You tend to feel most comfortable when there’s hard data and quantitative information to back-up whatever is being presented.
Did it feel true?
My thoughts from the first-hand experience taking the test and reevaluating myself.
Before seeing the results, I had some doubts about whether the 28 question set could really form a good understanding of a person and give an accurate result. However, it did give me a surprise! Personally and professionally, I always describe myself as a combination of hard facts and arts or a nerd (positive!) and a creative person. My work has always been about research, data, quantitative figure but ultimately, it is still about describing and understanding people which requires some human-touch interpretation. Beyond my main job, my passion and side projects are about movies and music which serve me as fuel for my creative lens and yes, they keep me going and artistically fulfilled.
The more interesting and surprisingly accurate part is about the dormant, ‘passion’ In this fascination test, passion is comparable to ‘emotion.’ As described in the results, people with passion as dormant advantage tend to avoid showing emotions instead, approaching things with rationale and logic. On the other hand, it is defined as a methodical problem-solver.
Even while reading about it, I was trying to make sense and connect the dots of why I had this as my dormant! One ‘logical’ explanation I found while analyzing myself was that I do believe about ‘not changing’ other people but more rather respect each individual as who they are. Especially in the professional context, I often would rather observe others before jumping right into conversations. Until this point, the test reflected this and made me have a second thought that allowing myself to open up a little more and practice on PASSION can help improve my communication and help me connect with others in a more approachable way.
Applying the Fascination as a marketer
Now we have seen what are the triggers that make us fascinating and how to activate the right one to unleash our fascinating charm. Knowing our strengths and using our natural fascination talent will help us as a marketer or as a person for both personal and team’s benefits. We are more aware of ourselves and our most and least advantage. The ability to fascinate others is then improved. The team has better synchronization and productivity is increased.
Hogshead presented in Ted — How to Fascinate that all markets are similar to online dating marketings. The same rules apply to all whether you sell products or services to customers or you sell yourself in an interview. In the marketing world, where now all of us are overwhelmed with information overload, we are competing for attention against all sorts of distractions. Eventually, all markets function like online dating markets because “we need to be able to get people to fall in love with our ideas.”
“Your personality is your greatest differentiator.” — Sally Hogshead
The final thought
Whether we can fully believe in all these personality tests will continue to be debatable and subjective depending on different people, the fact that we have self-awareness, a better understanding of ourselves and being able to think through and reflect ourselves definitely works to our advantage. It is the first step to start improving ourselves!
